In her memoir Presentation Parlour, published in 1963, the Limerick-born novelist Kate O’Brien (1897–1974), recalls five aunts of hers—two of them nuns—whom she came to know as a child in the early years of the twentieth century, when the country remained under British rule and the Great Famine was still within the living memory of many.
“They all came out of the same mould,” wrote O’Brien. Their fathers had been “hard-beaten peasants of the desperate ‘forties who had survived to reach the refuge of a town”, where they earned their way onto “the foothills of the middle class.” These men’s daughters, with limited convent educations, ended up “steeped, but steeped in Roman Catholicism, of which the conventions and period bigotries were as unquestionable to them as the rules—were indeed one and the same thing, for my aunts were not theologians.”
The five sisters read the same few books, held the same opinions about politics, and agreed that “a certain few things and ideas and ways of life were right, and that a thousand others, not to be mentioned if possible, were totally wrong and abominable”. Nevertheless, O’Brien noted, they were “individuals to a woman” who were “separated and different from each other in all that gave them identification of soul as ash tree is from birch, or blue eye is from brown.”
O’Brien is confronting an interesting paradox in the shape of her aunts. Namely, how does a society as seemingly narrow, conventional and rigidly conformist in its organisation and outlook as Catholic Ireland become so adept at producing—even within the confines of a single family—such a store of idiosyncratic, utterly distinctive, personalities? How can such uniform inputs generate such a rich diversity of outputs? Let’s call this the Catholic Character Paradox.
The Paradox appears also in Kate O’Brien’s fiction. Her 1938 novel Pray for the Wanderer—its title taken from the words of the hymn ‘Hail, Queen of Heaven’—contains a scene in the dining room of the Mahoneys, a middle-class Catholic family in 1930s ‘Mellick’ (O’Brien’s novelistic name for Limerick). Gathered around the table are the “magnificently unwelcoming” elderly mother, Hannah; her son, Tom, a lawyer with a cynical streak; and her niece, Nell—beautiful, strict and devout. Also present is Matt Costello: free spirit, former revolutionary and now very successful novelist, returned to Ireland from England to escape turmoil in his love life. Observing the spectacle of Irish Catholic bourgeois continuity unfolding before him in the Mahoney house and around the dinner table, Costello (like his creator when contemplating her aunts) is confronted by the Catholic Character Paradox
“He (…) marvelled at the strength of the three personalities which shared the benefits of this archaic and smooth routine, and which yet kept so far apart from each other, were so pointedly and eccentrically themselves.”
While it is a puzzle she appears to enjoy letting her mind swim around in, Kate O’Brien does not seek out an explanation for the paradox instantiated by her aunts in Presentation Parlour, and by the Mahoneys in Pray for the Wanderer. But she was an astute observer of the milieu she grew up in. The phenomenon she described was real. But what gave rise to it?
Might it be that the faith, as it was practiced once in Ireland, in the breadth of its teaching and the ubiquitousness of its presence, placed a whole gamut of questions, anxieties, and concerns, with their potential when unchecked to reduce us all to a bundle of personality-crushing neuroses, outside of quotidian range? As John Waters has written of the Irish mind (as it used to be), “God acted as a kind of buffer between the human being and absolute responsibility to be in control of every aspect of his or her own life. Problems could be offered up, handed over or placed for mediation with the Blessed Virgin or Saint Anthony.”
Both the meaning of life, then, along with all its attendant mysteries and miseries, were held, ultimately, to be in the hands of an ancient institution (an “expert in humanity,” no less) and its divine founder. The effect of this transfer—in continuous, perpetual operation through prayers, devotions, confession—was to free people up to be themselves and to express the full force and peculiarity of their personalities. Responsibilities and worries that might otherwise crush, control or petrify them were lightened or removed from their shoulders, or infused with a meaning that had the effect of transforming them. As Waters suggests, these trials could be either laid down or offered up, or otherwise subsumed into the eternal, supernatural life of the Church. Thus the totalizing tendency in Irish Catholicism (while undoubtedly the source of much constraint and conformism) could have also a liberating effect, producing the Catholic Character Paradox.
Others outside the Church appeared to notice this potential within Catholicism. In Converts, her new survey of twentieth-century artists, writers and intellectuals who swam the Tiber, Melanie McDonagh recounts an observation by an Anglican military chaplain, after he had encountered a Catholic counterpart on the Western Front in World War I, a man who “could alternate between Latin and Tommy’s language”:
“They have a perfectly credal faith—practical, dogmatic, supernatural. Round these fixed points everything is allowed to be in a state of flux.”
Kate O’Brien, as it happens, led an unconventional, flux-powered life herself. However, though she travelled and lived in, and sampled the delights of Spain and London and America, she never turned her back on Limerick, her family or the Church, returning to them continuously and respectfully in her person and her writing. At her instruction, four particular words were carved on her gravestone in the village near Canterbury in England where she died, suggesting both her affinity with her creation, Matt Costello, and her own elastic but enduring attachment to, and hope in, both the faith and the faithful:
“Pray for the wanderer”